Why do I see a sudden change in my stats?

There are two reasons why you may observe slight changes to your stats over time.

  • First, if the account of a user who engages (views, claps, etc.) with your story is deleted or suspended, then the engagement will also be removed. This can cause changes in your stats months or even years after the original engagement.
  • Second, you may see fluctuations in your recent stats based on the way that we calculate and provide real-time stats. This does not reflect a change in the actual metrics, but rather is a temporary side effect when tracking live stats. Below is an explanation:

We maintain two sources of stats for your stories:

  1. The first is a stable, long-term count of all engagement throughout time.
  2. The second is a short-term count that is updated in real-time. This real-time count has not yet been processed through robust deduplication checks and other safeguards.

Every hour, recent engagement on your post from the last hour is processed and converted from the short-term count into the long-term stable count. During this processing, we may identify duplicate or erroneous counts of the same clap or read. Therefore, the long-term stable count for that time period may end up differing slightly from the short-term count you previously saw. You will not observe fluctuations to your stats for a given time period in the long run, except in the case of user account deletion mentioned above.

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